Playable Worlds Scales MMO Gaming with Unity and AWS

Playable Worlds builds cloud-native MMOs that let users explore digital worlds as immersive as they are interactive. But that kind of gaming experience requires significant infrastructure and computing resources. To offer players stable, lag-free access to an expansive gaming experience like Stars Reach, Playable Worlds needed to ensure that its complex virtual environments could sync data in real time across multiple devices. “We didn’t want our games to require that players own powerful computing systems,” says Raph Koster, CEO of Playable Worlds. “We wanted our games to be accessible across devices.”

The level of detail in Playable Worlds’ games requires significant CPU and GPU resources, which increases the risk of high latency, frequent synchronization issues, and high costs. Playable Worlds needed a robust, scalable solution that could deliver real-time data synchronization while minimizing the need for advanced user hardware. Ideally, the solution also needed to be cost-effective and flexible to allow for rapid iteration and deployment of game updates and features.

To address these challenges, Playable Worlds partnered with Unity and AWS for a cloud-based solution that’s optimized for multiplayer game development and support. Unity’s innovative Data-Oriented Technology Stack (DOTS) and Entity Component System (ECS) were central to this solution because they enable multi-core performance for high frame rates in fast-paced gameplay. “With DOTS, you can have hundreds of thousands of objects on screen without anything breaking down,” says Joseph Willmon, senior client partner at Unity. “You can also run extraordinarily detailed simulations at scale, such as what Playable Worlds is doing on AWS.” To manage large player counts, the team uses the Netcode for Entities networking solution, which offers server-authoritative models, client-side prediction, and lag compensation for enhanced multiplayer responsiveness and is designed to work alongside DOTS and the Entity Component System.

AWS provided the necessary cloud infrastructure to support the Unity Engine and enhance its capabilities. By deploying the Unity Engine on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, Playable Worlds gained access to on-demand computing resources that could handle the high processing and graphical requirements of its games, with AWS GPU-powered instances facilitating complex physics calculations that ensure player synchronization in real-time. Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) offered Playable Worlds a scalable object storage solution to handle its growing content library. Playable Worlds also leveraged AWS Graviton to optimize cost efficiency and performance, particularly for Linux workloads, allowing the company to maximize resource utilization while minimizing cost per player. "Lag-free environments are crucial to a great gaming experience," says Koster. "AWS services ensure our games scale and run seamlessly, which provides the responsive simulation environment that delights players.”

To further optimize the Playable Worlds’ gaming experience, Unity integrated AWS services including Amazon ElastiCache and Elastic Load Balancing (ELB). Amazon ElastiCache provided a low-latency caching layer for efficient synchronization that reduced data retrieval times and minimized latency, while ELB ensured even distribution of network traffic that maintained high availability and fault tolerance for Playable Worlds' online services. The combination of these services allowed Playable Worlds to handle large numbers of concurrent users without compromising on-game performance or user experience.

Unity also incorporated Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) to enhance the scalability and flexibility of Playable Worlds’ server architecture. By using Amazon EKS, Playable Worlds could effectively manage containerized applications, enabling automated deployment, scaling, and operation of containers across clusters of hosts. This approach provided a robust framework for managing server workloads that guaranteed high availability and reliability—crucial for MMO games that require persistent, always-on environments.

The Unity solution on AWS has allowed Playable Worlds to greatly enhance its ability to create and manage expansive, dynamic online game worlds—and process a lot of data quickly. Playable Worlds now processes up to 270 million calculations per second using cloud GPUs, enabling the highly detailed simulations that bring its game environments to life. And by meshing 12,000 data blocks per second, Playable Worlds maintains real-time rendering that keeps the immersive quality of Stars Reach seamless.

The new solution delivered real-time data synchronization across devices, reduced latency, and provided a smooth, engaging experience for players no matter their hardware capabilities. It has reduced both the patching and deployment time for Playable Worlds, as well as content delivery network (CDN) costs. Playable Worlds also achieved 99.4% data compression, enhancing the customer experience by reducing bandwidth requirements.

Looking forward, Playable Worlds plans to continue leveraging Unity and AWS to deploy quicker updates, iterate faster, and drive increased engagement from its users. The cloud-native infrastructure positions Playable Worlds to integrate new features that use artificial intelligence (AI) and further expand the company’s global footprint.

The collaboration between Unity and AWS has helped Playable Worlds future-proof its MMO development, making it easier for the company to deliver groundbreaking game experiences worldwide.